The ThreatThere were only a few application areas [of information security] that people really worried about thirty years ago: diplomatic and military communications at one end, and the security of things like cash machines at the other. As we’ve gone about putting computers and communications into just about everything that you can buy for more than ten bucks that you don’t eat or drink, the field has grown.

WWW: The Way We WereThe final two episodes of Halt and Catch Fire aired last night. […] The Web that they are talking about on the show, the open Web, is ailing, dying. It was like listening to a eulogy at a funeral, this thing that I love, poured the best of my self into, gone forever.

AWS Security PrimerI was preparing some AWS Security related training. Soon, I realized that this topic is too huge to fit into my brain. So I structured my thoughts in a mind map. Within a couple of minutes1 I came up with this.

Takeaways From the ServerlessConf 2017Serverless computing basically adds another layer of abstraction on top of cloud infrastructure so that the developer doesn’t need to worry about servers, including virtual ones.

How Google Is Challenging AWSBig companies are often criticized for having “missed” the future — from the comfortable perch of a present where said future has come to pass, of course — but while the future is still the future incumbents are first more often than not.

How the Internet works: Submarine fibre, brains in jars, and coaxial cablesHave you ever thought about how that cat picture actually gets from a server in Oregon to your PC in London? We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet.

CPU Utilization is WrongThe metric we all use for CPU utilization is deeply misleading, and getting worse every year. What is CPU utilization? How busy your processors are? No, that’s not what it measures. Yes, I’m talking about the “%CPU” metric used everywhere, by everyone.

Practical jqI really love jq, the JSON processor. It has changed my life and pretty much replaced Perl and Ruby as my ETL and data-munging go-to tools.

Reshaping JSON with jqWorking with data from an art museum API and from the Twitter API, this lesson teaches how to use the command-line utility jq to filter and parse complex JSON files into flat CSV files.

A Visual Guide to What’s New in Swagger 3.0Over the past few years, Swagger 2 has become the de facto standard for defining or documenting your API. Since then, it’s been moved to the Linux foundation and renamed to OpenAPI Spec.

A plan for open source software maintainersAs I envision it, a solution would look something like a cross between Patreon and Bugzilla: Users would be able sign up to “support” projects of their choosing […] and would be able to open issues.

Developer hiring and the market for lemonsThe fact that joining a new team is uncertain makes developers less likely to leave existing teams, which makes it harder to hire developers. But the fact that developers often join teams which they dislike makes it easier to hire developers. What’s the net effect of that? I have no idea.

Execution in the Kingdom of NounsIn the Kingdom of Javaland, where King Java rules with a silicon fist, people aren’t allowed to think the way you and I do. In Javaland, you see, nouns are very important, by order of the King himself. Nouns are the most important citizens in the Kingdom.

Torching the Modern-Day Library of AlexandriaWhen the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an “international catastrophe.” When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who’d had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.

Know Thy Complexities!This webpage covers the space and time Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science.

Let’s stop copying C / fuzzy notepadThe popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable.

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVsPartially as a companion piece to my recent post about how CSV is an encoding nightmare, and partially an expression of frustration, I’ve decided to make a list of falsehoods programmers believe about CSVs.